by Ulla Lenze
“I’ll stop.”
“Good luck. I know Schmuederrich and his men. He wears that uniform of his for a reason.”
Panic flooded his body, brief flashing moments of horror that reached down to his toes. As if his body already knew everything, knew the true magnitude of the situation. He accepted a cigarette from Arthur. They smoked in silence. The machines were clattering loudly by now, they could hear voices.
“Sorry. I can’t offer you any reassurances. You’re in a heap of shit,” said Arthur before he left.
“I suppose I’ll need to extend my time off from the print shop a little bit longer,” he answered hoarsely.
15
Neuss, July 1949
HE LIES IN HIS ROOM, COMPLETELY ENCASED IN CARL’S LIFE, down to his underwear. But his body seems not to want to let go of American time. His arms and legs are heavy with sleep. He could always sleep more. The sheets are warm and fragrant—he has never slept on such good sheets.
How long has he been here? The heat seems to blur everything together, make it all indistinguishable, like newsprint smudged under his fingertips.
He plays with the tassels of the white curtains. He makes little knots in them, and when he realizes, he undoes them again (but only for Edith’s sake). When he stands up the floorboards creak. And so he stays in bed. He wishes the family would forget him. That they would move on with their lives so he could move on with his. But then again, what life?
Here he is, suddenly back in his homeland, but it’s in ruins. The streets full of rubble and children playing. He could go to work for Carl, but that’s the last thing he feels like doing.
He imitates Carl’s voice: “I listened to Radio London. Tell me now, were you, over in America—were you able to educate yourself about what was happening here? No? Why not? Oh, so maybe you did after all?”
He thinks of the curiosity in Edith’s voice: “What’s it like to walk through New York? I mean, what’s it like when the buildings are so tall—isn’t it scary?”
There is something delicate, and yet at the same time strong, about Edith. It’s as though while Carl keeps ratcheting things up, she keeps dialing them back, lapsing into simple existence, an existence that has her bending down, picking up, passing around, bringing, clearing away, pouring, asking, nodding, with scarcely noticeable resentment.
They talk about everything but say little. “It’s like an oven outside,” said Edith yesterday.
“I’m only breathing through my mouth, like a dog,” he said.
She smiled. Then she asked, “Does it ever get this hot in New York?”
“Yes, and then people go to the air-conditioned department stores.”
“Air-conditioned?”
“Cool air from a cooling system.”
“That must cost a fortune.”
“We Americans will do anything for the customer.” We—he had actually said “we.”
“One of the hens died. Do you know how to butcher a hen, Josef?”
“Unfortunately that’s not something I learned in New York.”
“I’ll take the hen to a neighbor.”
“Carl can’t do it?”
They looked at each other. He laughed first; she laughed with him. Then she turned around, shamefaced. Pulled the knot of her apron a bit tighter before she bent back over the oven.
* * *
He presses his cheek into the pillow. He observes himself as he cries, and doesn’t trust himself. And then the words: I want to go home. I want to go home. He doesn’t trust these words either. There is no home.
Now he hears other voices. From the kitchen. Carl is shouting at his son. It lasts a good long time, then comes silence, and then something else. He recognizes the sound. When he goes to investigate, the boy is already out the door. Carl turns and looks at him, surprised.
The floorboards creak with every breath he takes.
“What did he do this time?”
“Stole a stamp.”
“For God’s sake, that was me. I wrote a letter.”
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
He doesn’t know how to answer that. He laughs awkwardly.
“Just who were you writing?”
“Someone I knew from New York. He lives in Pulheim now.”
“Did he get deported too?”
“A year before me,” Josef says, making an effort to keep calm. The scorn in his brother’s voice gets to him nonetheless.
“And how did you know each other?”
“Through the German American Bund. A political organization. It was patriotic and was committed to the fight against Communism.”
“That sounds like a good thing,” says Carl.
Yes, it sounds good. He left out a few details.
Carl steps closer and says, “The Communists now occupy half of Germany. It’ll be fun to see how that turns out.”
“It sure will.”
“Did you ever once have to deal with kids, Josef?”
“My girlfriends were all childless.”
“Girlfriends,” Carl repeats.
“Girlfriends.”
“What’s this person’s name, this person you’re writing?”
“Hans Dörsam.”
In the evening, swallows go sailing across the sky. The bench in the garden is a good place to watch them. He shakes a cigarette out of the pack—still American—and suddenly has a feeling, as though he were capable of picking up all the world’s news, bad news too, the kind of news that always catches you unprepared, like a shot in the back. He’s in just the right mood, the kind of mood one should always be in: open, full of life and feeling. He knows now he’ll be moving on.
When he tastes the filter, he puts the cigarette out with his shoe, picks up the butt, and puts it back in the pack. So Carl won’t have to make a fuss. As he’s standing up he sees the boy in the corner of his eye. He seems to have been standing in the doorway for quite a while now, watching him. Like a spy. He has to laugh. All over the world, everywhere he goes, he is watched.
“Come here for a second,” Josef calls out to him. The boy comes closer and stops in front of him.
“Sit down.”
The boy doesn’t move.
“Care for one?” He offers his cigarettes to the boy. The boy shakes his head.
“You don’t smoke?”
“I’m thirteen.”
Josef puts the pack back in his pants pocket.
“I took the stamp. Your father knows now. I’m sorry.”
He was expecting gratitude, but the boy just shrugs his shoulders. Did he not understand him?
“Soon you’ll be grown up, and you’ll start fighting back. You’re almost as tall as your father already.”
The boy says nothing.
“Half a year at the most, then you’ll start fighting back.”
Silence. What’s he doing wrong?
“I’d like to give you something, but I don’t have any money. All I’ve got is empty pockets. In your family I’m like another child.”
“Can I go?” asks the boy.
The next day he sees Edith sawing, screwing, sanding, varnishing. She’s building a cupboard down in the basement. Edith can do things like that. Carl has gone to Koblenz—business. The children have gone off into the fields with their teacher to look for potato beetles. Restful quiet in the house. He feels like cooking lunch himself for once.
He lingers outside the door for a long time, trying to glean from her movements what kind of mood she’s in. Really it’s always the same with her. She works. Last night she dropped into an armchair with a sigh and stared at the little glass of turnip schnapps that Carl had handed her. Then, more or less indifferently, she tipped the liquor back.
He understands her. Quite well, in fact.
He himself managed to get away from him.
He could tell Edith what’s playing and set her free. In his imagination they’re sitting in his apartment in Harlem and listening to jazz.
No, he doesn’t thi
nk she should run off with him of all people, her no-account brother-in-law. He of all people shouldn’t be the one to set her free. On the other hand, men are now scarce in Germany.
“Josef, why are you hanging around like that?” she calls out.
“I can make us some lunch.”
This gets a smile from her. She pushes herself up off the floor, screws the top on a can of lacquer, wipes her hands on her apron.
“I can cook, believe me!”
Now she’s laughing, as if he’d told a really good joke. “All right, fine. But I’ll come with you and show you where everything is.”
While she looks on, he opens the doors of the pantry with both hands and feels as though he were taking a woman’s dress off. Before him are jars of beans, semolina, flour, a few potatoes, and a bottle of sunflower oil. Not much, but in the garden he saw ripe tomatoes and parsley.
“I’ll cook us something Italian!” he declares.
“What exactly do you need?” she asks.
“Tomatoes.”
She watches him in the garden, and for every tomato he picks he first has to secure her permission. Finally they pay the hens a visit. He’s able to snag two eggs, almost too much for what he has planned: gnocchi. She repeats the word after him, a question in her voice. “They’re Italian potato dumplings.”
While he chops onions, Edith applies glue to two shards of a broken cup and presses them together.
“What were your days like?” she asks and puts glue on another crack. Before now no one wanted to hear any details about Ellis Island. He grabs a big potato and starts to tell her about it.
“Our life on the island. It was like this. In the beginning they would wake us up at six o’clock in the morning. Then they realized it didn’t actually make any sense—what were they getting us up so early for? It’s not like we had anything to do. And so they started letting us sleep until eight thirty. Breakfast was served throughout the morning, but after that you had to pay.”
He looks over at Edith. She’s testing out the mended cup. “How many of you were there?”
“A few hundred. Four or five hundred. The majority were Germans. Then Italians and Japanese.”
“And none of them had committed any crimes?”
He puts some water on to boil and drops in the potatoes. The harmless storytelling approach won’t work.
“Starting in December 1941 it was enough to be German. In some cases even the wives and children were moved onto the island with the husbands. They thought it was just temporary, but they were held there for years.”
He didn’t tell her about the other men. Or that on April 20th there was cake for everyone, and on each slice Dörsam wrote “Heil Adolf” in chocolate icing.
“But why?”
“Some were interned so that they could be exchanged for American prisoners.”
She shakes her head uncertainly.
“It’s true, Edith, whole families were torn apart.”
“Well, that’s awful,” she says.
He nods and waits for the next question, but it doesn’t come. The potatoes bob in the water; he dices the tomatoes. “But they treated us well.” Edith brings out her sewing kit. Her fingers probe the hole in a sock. He tells her about the library, where they could find anything they wanted, including newspapers; about the board games, the card games, and the soccer games in the courtyard. And he tells her about the two rows of barbed wire. That from his window he could see two rows of barbed wire and beyond them Manhattan and often wondered whether he could possibly make it. It was just a half-mile swim to New Jersey. Difficult, but doable. He often went swimming in the ocean in the summer. Coney Island was his favorite beach, but you could also swim in the Harlem River, right where he lived. But she knew that. He’d told her already. The neighborhood with the jazz clubs and the black Americans.
“So it wasn’t like being imprisoned here,” she said.
“They treated us well, that’s true. But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” He tries to meet her eye. “Right, Edith?”
“Of course it’s a good thing,” she says icily. Her slight reserve hurts him. Is she trying to suggest he should have been punished with German methods? Her expression is blank. With one hand she fishes for a ball of yarn in her sewing basket; it’s gotten tangled up with another.
The words are still with him. He’ll never forget them. They should stick you Germans in your own camps.
Whenever he thinks of these words, he thinks of everything else he saw that afternoon. The FBI had picked them up from the island in groups and taken them to the Bureau’s offices for a film screening. His face had felt very tense, and he had had to shut his eyes. When he opened them at one point, the men on-screen were just leaving a shed, handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and mouths, dogged looks on their faces. Whispers in the screening room. Someone had called out, “Heil Hitler.” Laughter had broken out. The American guards ignored both. Dörsam’s face was like stone. Later, on the ferry, as they sailed toward the stately buildings on the water in the red twilight, Dörsam said, “And the carpet bombings of our cities? The mountains of corpses in our streets? Of course they don’t show us that!”
The man could actually find a way to get outraged, even now.
Behind him someone had said, “Now, that’s how you run a prison camp!” Josef had turned around and nodded at the GI, assuming there was a measure of understanding between them. But the soldier’s eyes were cold: “They should stick you Germans in your own camps.”
He had turned his back on the man again, his hand on the railing, the knuckles tense and white.
Now he looks nervously around the kitchen, trying, as he sets the table, to forget the words. He serves Edith gnocchi with tomato sauce: “Buon appetito, dear sister-in-law.”
“It looks appetizing,” she says and tastes carefully.
“Well, how do you like it?”
“It’s a nice thing to eat.”
“It’s a nice thing to eat?”
She smiles. “Carl wouldn’t like it.”
I believe it, he thinks.
“Carl punishes Paul often, doesn’t he?”
Why won’t she say anything? Edith knows how to get through to her son. Sometimes she puts her hand on his shoulder. Then even his nervous blinking stops.
And so he goes on: “I wouldn’t want to be Carl’s child. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets it in his head to punish me next.”
“He’s a good man, Josef. And don’t forget, you weren’t here. It was a difficult time in Germany.”
“What I’m actually trying to say, Edith, is that Carl makes you unhappy.”
She lets go of her fork.
“You deserve a better life,” he hears himself saying softly. “Edith, don’t put up with so much. Try to find more enjoyment in your life.”
“Who do you think you are, Josef?”
She hasn’t had much practice in shouting, unlike Carl. She jumps up. He also gets up, reaches for her hand—why? Because he’s already lost, he can at least touch her hand just once. To his surprise she doesn’t resist. They stand silently across from each other. As if suddenly, despite it all, she understands everything. Everything, everything. Or is she just frozen with shock? Don’t kiss her, he tells himself. If you kiss her now, you won’t just ruin her life but your own too. And you’re world champion at that.
He lets go of her slender hand.
“Sorry, Edith. I shouldn’t intrude. Please forgive me.”
They spend the rest of the meal in silence, and when he offers to help her wash up, she sends him outside, like the kids. Go off and play somewhere—he can almost hear her saying it.
16
New York, April 1939
HE TRIED HARD NOT TO GIVE ANYTHING AWAY. HE HAD DISCONNECTED an important copper wire from the transmitter; for the time being the radio was dead. He fumbled around in the back while they looked on, and as he did so noted that when it came to technical matters they were both completely clueless. Ma
x stood around helplessly and kept asking, “Will you be able to fix it?” Finally, when they’d already missed both transmitting windows, he took the soldering iron and resealed the clipped connection so that everything worked again.
When the two of them had left he felt like a wrung-out sponge, unable to resume its old shape.
They really did need him. That’s what he had wanted to know.
The next time he served them drinks, claiming, since it was still early in the day, that it was his birthday and he wanted to celebrate. Max went with beer; Ludwig had whiskey. He made sure to keep refilling their glasses. With Ludwig he had to pour often—he could handle a lot—but with Max, however, he slowly began to notice him growing gentle and sleepy and finally starting to hum along to Billie Holiday.
“It’s not a textile company. Right?”
“What else is it supposed to be, Josef?”
“It’s for the Germans. For Germany.”
The two of them looked at each other and laughed quietly, as if he were a child who had said something funny.
“You sure catch on quick,” said Max.
“And what is it we’re sending?”
“Industry and military figures. Not to worry. A lot of it is completely legal, from trade publications—anyone can access it.”
Max’s hands were in his pockets; Josef could see they were balled up into fists. He tapped his foot nervously, and not along to the music.
Ludwig sank deep into his chair.
“They send people to prison for this.”
“We have to know the state of America’s military so that we’re not at a disadvantage. Every country acts this way. What’s the problem?”
He went on. Josef shouldn’t believe everything the Americans said about the Germans. Like that Germany was preparing for war—that was propaganda. The world just couldn’t handle the fact that Germany had gotten so strong.
“Theft does come into play, though,” Ludwig interjected.
“Thanks to the people who work in the factories, we now have the Norden bombsight. And that’s a good thing, Josef, isn’t it? The Norden bombsight can hit a pickle jar from a height of six thousand meters! With it you can avoid an inferno like Guernica.”